Turntable has just announced that it will shut down turntable.fm, an online community to play and listen to music in real time.
In exchange, the Turntable team will be shifting all focus on Turntable Live, an interactive concert experience which launched several months ago. Turntable stated, “There was a real desire for artists to reach more fans than normally possible with a regular live show” and saw a lot of potential with Turntable Live. With demand from fans and artists alike – along with the reason that “the cost of running a music service has been too expensive and we can’t outpace it with our efforts to monetize it and cut costs” – Turntable will be pushing all efforts towards their new project.
For past and former turntable.fm users, Turntable will host a last day party on December 2. And for those users who have saved a lot of music on their playlists, Turntable offers a way to export your music to Spotify or CSV.
As a former heavily active user on turntable.fm (my username was cookiemonkey1004 for any fellow ttfm users), I’m saddened at this news, as I have met so many amazing friends – both online and offline – thanks to the community, not to mention the opportunity to share and be exposed to great music. But as an attendee for some of the Turntable Live concerts, I have had the awesome experience of listening to 4 DJs in one night and to directly chat and message them, and I hope that Turntable Live will grow in success and continue to connect more artists with their fans.
Read the full news on Turntable’s blog.